Tuesday, 2 November 2010

Moomins, Monsters and Mitfords

Part of the reason for starting this blog, apart from having somewhere to witter on about my obsessions with food, knitting and books, is to start exploring Manchester more. I've lived here for a year, having spent all of my previous years in London and the South East, but a combination of work, studying and poorliness have prevented me from engaging with all that the city has to offer.

With that in mind, the boy and I set off to Bury Art Gallery at the weekend and discovered Moomins! The gallery is tiny but has a great exhibition of a selection of drawings by Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. The drawings themselves were very fragile so didn't take any piccies but here's one of the little Moomins on the floor pointing you in the right direction!

The gallery also had an exhibition of paper sculptures and my favourite was the swirly spiral made of books pictured at the beginning of the post. A trip to nearby Bury Market resulted in the purchase of some gorgeous local goats' cheese and some beautiful crumbly Lancashire cheese dotted through with sweet red onion. Then it was home for me to munch my way through said cheese, the boy to carve the Halloween pumpkin and to wait for Trick or Treaters!

Whilst waiting, I've been gorging on Debo Devonshire's memoirs "Wait for Me", which was a really unexpected present from some friends. It is fascinating! Not just the youngest Mitford sister, Debo is also the Duchess of Devonshire, friend of the Kennedys and full of interesting insights on how Britain and it's countryside have changed over the last five or so decades.

I'm off to finish it now before getting on with some secret Christmas knitting. Having made the decision to make most of my Christmas presents, I've realised that this is going to take a loooooong time so had better crack on with it!